There has been a long felt need for the blending of brick during the manufacture thereof, so that the entire blending job does not become the responsibility of the brick mason as the structure is built. If proper blending is not effected, either by the manufacturer, or by the brick mason, the resulting structure may have an undesirable finished appearance, due to the relative difference in shades of brick, some of which differences are intentional, and some of which cannot be controlled.
For example, during the initial forming of the brick it is common to introduce differently colored sands or slurries for short periods of time, so that each final brick package will include a mixture of differently colored bricks therein. It is not possible to so change the sand colors fast enough, that successive individual bricks will be a different color. It is more likely that a several foot section of extruded clay which eventually may form one or two rows may be of one color, with the preceding or successive section being of a different color. Therefore, after extruding and cutting successive rows, either by a rotating wire or by a push-through cutter, it would be desirable to be able to displace selected bricks from spaced positions in one row to subsequent or preceding rows, so that intra-row blending (i.e., the shades of brick within each row) may be effected.
In known approaches to the solution, there is no attempt to effect intra-row blending by mechanical displacement of selected bricks from spaced positions within one row to either an upstream, downstream, or adjacent row at any time, either during automatic mechanical hacking or dehacking. The only known attempts are directed to the displacement of an entire course, layer, or continuous row portion onto a different course, layer or row from which it was initially processed. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,717,264 to Lingl, Jr. Such an attempt does not solve the problem of obtaining good blending of the color differences incorporated into a brick run by means of the introduction of different colored sands or slurries for brief periods in the hopper immediately prior to or after extrusion of the brick slugs.